BackupPC #3 - Backing Up a Windows Machine

I'm going to take a break from the public/private key issues as described in part 2, and instead focus on backing up my Windows machine.

We keep all of our documents, photos, music, and other important files on the server, so I only need to backup machine specific things. In my case, I'm mainly interested in my Thunderbird address book. After a little digging around, I've decided to grab the Application Data and My Documents folders. I'm not looking at the entire Documents and Settings folder because I don't want to backup all of the temporary Internet files, nor will I include the Desktop folder, since it is where I store downloaded TV shows and other temporary things (that add up to lots of GBs and would fill up the backup server quickly).

As instructed on page 6 of our tutorial, I started by setting up a shared folder on the desktop machine. I added a line to /etc/backuppc/hosts for this machine, and this time I used a '1' in the 2nd column to indicate a DHCP assigned address.

Next, I created a configuration file for the desktop and copied the suggested lines from the tutorial and updated the information for my situation. I don't really like storing my password in text like that. I'll have to secure the file to keep prying eyes out.

I also included the following line to limit the backup to the two desired directories.

$Conf{BackupFilesOnly} = ['/Application Data', '/My Documents'];

I restarted the daemon, and then started the backup from the web page. It's going and seems to be OK.

In part #4, I'll return to the file server problems.